Posted
by
Soulskillon Friday July 22, 2011 @03:36PM
from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Mike Barthel reports on a technique called brick-wall limiting, where songs are engineered to seem louder by bringing the quiet parts to the same level as the loud parts and pushing the volume level of the entire song to the highest point possible. 'Because of the need to stand out on radio and other platforms, there's a strategic advantage to having a new song sound just a little louder than every other song. As a result, for a period, each new release came out a little louder than the last, and the average level of loudness on CDs crept up (YouTube) to such a degree that albums actually sounded distorted, as if they were being played through broken speakers.' But the loudness wars may be coming to an end. Taking advantage of the trend towards listening to music online — via services like Pandora, Spotify, and Apple's forthcoming iCloud — a proposal by audio engineer Thomas Lund, already adopted as a universal standard (PDF) by the International Telecommunications Union, would institute a volume limit on any songs downloaded from the cloud, effectively removing the strategic advantage of loudness. Lund's proposal would do the same thing for any music you could buy. 'Once a piece of music is ingested into this system, there is no longer any value in trying to make a recording louder just to stand out,' says legendary engineer Bob Ludwig, who has been working with Lund. 'There will be nothing to gain from a musical point of view. Louder will no longer be better!'"

I hope this is able to transition to broadcast television broadcasts. I'm sick and tired of commercials being substantially louder than the program they're playing within. Every time a commercial break comes around I have to mute the fucking thing, which seems like the complete opposite of what they're supposed to be trying to accomplish.

I work in TV. The last station I worked at we had one advertiser that used to send us REALLY loud commercials. We had to dial them back about 10db to put them into the system at normal levels. The next batch of commercials they sent us were another 10db louder, so we had to dial them back 20db. The next batch was so recorded so hot they were distorted from the start so we rejected the tapes and sent them back to the ad agency. They couldn't get the hint that we couldn't air such loud content without ov

I wish manufacturers would provide some means of calibrating various components to deliver a similar amount of volume. It gets really annoying having to readjust the volume when I switch between the various devices hooked to my TV. It wouldn't be so bad if the range wasn't so large.

So that we don't get distorted audio. Even when the amplitude itself isn't causing distortion, the perceived volume change of different pitches is not proportional to their change in amplitude. That is to say, if a song is mixed at high volume and then played at a low volume, the mix won't sound right. For badly mixed music it won't matter, but I'd rather the record labels didn't f*ck with masterpieces mixed by Tom and Chris Lord-Alge, for example.

say, if a song is mixed at high volume and then played at a low volume, the mix won't sound right

Then it wasn't mixed right. That's the whole point of using reference monitors and your ears. You are supposed to mix with loud, quiet, and in-between in your mind, and check your mixes at all of those levels.

Proposed solution: following a standard that limits loudness would remove the strategic advantage of loudness.What will happen: the standard would be ignored.

Nah, instead the RIAA will use it as a marketing campaign to re-release their entire back-catalog with the original dynamic range as yet another "remastered" edition that every fan must buy. Meanwhile, they will screw something else up so that the new releases are still flawed in some other way, just so that they can go ahead and fix that problem in another 10 years and re-sell us all the same music again.

We're certainly throwing away the idea of subtlety, of creating music that has any kind of dynamic range. Instead it's all got to be blaring and blasting, bass parts sounding like they were done on slowed-down kazoos and the guitars just one big mash of chords, and singers who, if they're voices aren't completely digitally altered to sound like they're singing from a merry-go-round moving at 200RPM, sound pretty much like one of those WWI wireless sets.

I have had a similar thing between an older CD of Carl Orfs Carmina Burana [wikipedia.org] and a newer one. The older disk was of a 1940's or 1950's recording where as the newer one was a recent recording. Even with the recording artifacts of the original reel to reel or what ever the original medium was the older version is mush better. This is another one where set the volume low since it hits hard. The newer copy is much more uniform but because of it is so much less impressive to listen to.

Also:Polka and Fugue by WeinbergerThe Pines of Rome, last movement - by Resphighi (blew a circuit breaker playing this LOUD)

Also check out some of the old 90's Telarc samplers. Telarc is known for some fantastically clean, high dynamic range recordings. I have the Great Fantasy Adventure Album, with songs from various films along with sound effects, including the famous Jurassic Lunch track that will destroy your speakers if you're not careful - I'm not exaggerating.

It doesn't matter to me how loud a song sounds; I can always turn the volume down or use something like ReplayGain to lower the overall level. The real issue is the compression of the dynamic range used to achieve louder sounding music. This proposal doesn't address that: a volume limit isn't going to provide an incentive to expand the dynamic range, since producers are just going to make sure every song bumps right up to the new brick wall.

Dynamic range simply isn't important to most producers and consumers of popular music now.

Mod parent up. Dynamic range (or lack thereof) is a matter of taste, and all this new standard does is give producers a new "brick wall" to run up against. However, since the new wall would be below the level of audio clipping, perhaps it's an improvement in that respect.

Eventually people will get tired of today's over-compressed sound, and will rediscover the joys of music dynamics. As a (very) small-time songwriter, I can appreciate the appeal of chest-thumping, all-11s sound, for a specific effect. B

Simply limiting the volume is going to cause more problems without really solve anything. So you've limited me to 75% volume. I'm just going to put all my music right up at that 75%! But this time it will sound even worse because now I'll only be using 75% of my available dynamic range.

A system like ReplayGain is much better because it preserves all the dynamic range and fidelity of the original track. Instead of limiting the volume, it adjusts post-decode every album/track to have the same average volu

This. Exactly this. My entire library is ReplayGained, and that makes listening to it much easier on me, but when I choose to listen to my music on a high-quality sound system and turn it up, its because I want to get every detail out of the original composition that I can.

Incidentally, this is one of the main reasons die-hards still think vinyl sounds better -- its not that you have better audio density (you don't; but that's another discussion), its that often when albums are mastered for vinyl, the dynam

Almost every song, including ones that aren't "loud" are normalized to 0dBFS. The thing is that they have large dynamic range, so their average signal level might be -30dBFS thus making them "quiet" when played back at a given volume. If you limit the shit out of dynamics, it makes the whole thing louder at a given setting on the volume dial.

That is what people mean when they complain about the "loudness wars." Modern music can't force your system to be loud, I can set my receiver to -80dBref and no sound will be louder than 35dB since that is how it works. The song can't override the volume setting. The problem is that they have no dynamic range, and thus don't sound as good.

A song that has dynamic range you actually turn the volume dial up on. As the "ref" part implies my system is calibrated to a reference point, in particular the THX cinema reference of 105dBSPL for mains, 115dBSPL for the sub. So when I set my dial to 0dB, that is the limit. That is what I set it to for movies, and get a theater experience. However I don't blow out my ears since the average level in movies is usually 30-40dB below reference. So despite the limit being 105dBSPL, I am usually listening to things in the 65-75dBSPL range. That dynamic range is what makes it sound good, and is what lets big hits, well, hit.

Music is squashed down, so I have to listen to it at like -30dBref on the dial. ends up being about the same normal volume level, it just means there's no headroom, that everything is the same volume.

The solution is NOT a volume limit, the solution is to have dynamic range in the files themselves, and put a limiter in the playback device. That way if someone wants it limited, they can turn that on, but you can get full range when you wish.

Ever since DVD movies came out the dynamic range became too great. I turn up the volume to hear dialog and then a car horn or dog barking blows me off the couch. The normalizer setting on VLC is not what I want. I want something like this:

The volume is set to a certain level, that is the level I want and nothing should ever go louder than it. Is that too much to ask for?

There are purists who want dynamic range and all that and the rest of the people who want to listen to the music in cars or when walking. The solution should be simple - two masters - 16 bit, 44Khz CDs with loudness for the car/walking people and an HD version that is 24 bit, 96 Khz with full dynamic range that listen to music in their anechoic chambers.

Blu-rays now have that mode, Master-HD or something like that that does uncompressed 24/96 sound. I don't know

It doesn't matter to me how loud a song sounds; I can always turn the volume down or use something like ReplayGain to lower the overall level. The real issue is the compression of the dynamic range used to achieve louder sounding music. This proposal doesn't address that: a volume limit isn't going to provide an incentive to expand the dynamic range, since producers are just going to make sure every song bumps right up to the new brick wall.

Dynamic range simply isn't important to most producers and consumers of popular music now.

Maybe it's because I'm a dinosaur myself, but I can't stand over-compressed recordings. Few people are aware that terrestrial radio stations often limit and compress their signal before transmitting it - a technique that I think probably began as a way to let the sound stand out against road noise for those who listen to the radio in their cars. The problem is that not only does that limit the dynamic range (how much so depends on the level of compression), destroying the artist's intended contrast between

You can make all the recommendations and standards you want, but you can't force the studio engineers to obey them, nor can you change the studio executives who are demanding the loudness and writing the checks to the studios. There is a great deal of the attitude in the music industry that "I make a lot of money doing this, and you don't, so my way is clearly right!" So, this movement will probably involve a lot of independent artists. We need pop artists on board.

If we can somehow start a campaign to get people to enjoy an expanded dynamic range, maybe we can raise awareness of how much better music can sound. Maybe albums/tracks engineered correctly could have another small logo somewhere indicating such a thing - call it something like "HDR Audio" (High Dynamic Range) that makes people think.. "Ooh, HD, this one is better than the one without it" or "HDR is the popular thing in photography, so it's probably good with audio".

I'm all for more artists and engineers preserving the vitality of their music.

But what if Walmart, Target, iTunes, Amazon, Clear Channel, and others all got behind the standard and said they wouldn't sell/play the recordings if they didn't meet the standard. It probably won't happen, but if it did, I bet the studio engineers and executives would follow suit. However, I think the standard would have to not only include a volume limit, but also limit the ability for the engineers to compress the dynamic range. Not sure how easy it would be to police this as some music is loud through

'Because of the need to stand out on radio and other platforms, there's a strategic advantage to having a new song sound just a little louder than every other song.

Wait, what? If they're all doing this, then how is one still louder than the previous song? And what is this talk of the "radio" platform? You mean the NPR/baseball machine in my car can be used for streaming music? How retro!

Pardon my ignorance, but where in Thomas Lund's proposed standard does it introduce a volume limit on "songs downloaded from the cloud", or indeed on any kind of song at all? A cursory glance suggests the document concerns a means of measuring loudness rather than a means of regulating it.

You are right - limits in the levels are missing, but the proposal explicitly states that it is intended as a groundwork for introducing those by defining a baseline algorithm for measurement.

In the long run, this might only limit clipping due to overly aggressive mixing. The true loudness war caused by compression of dynamic range in the mixing process might not go away as a result. And I don't know how that could even be regulated.

A cursory glance suggests the document concerns a means of measuring loudness rather than a means of regulating it.

If each track comes with loudness measurements, listeners will use these measurements in their playback devices to give all songs the same loudness so as not to have to turn the volume up and down when playing different songs. (See for example players supporting Replay Gain.) Songs mastered near the clipping point will be played back with reduced volume compared to, say, "Money for Nothing" or other tracks off Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. The idea as I understand it is that labels will self-regulate be

We need to enact some kind of legislation against autotune. Or use the SAP channel for the non-auto-tuned version. I'm sure music is just going through a new synthesizer revolution like in the early 80s, and it'll eventually be used properly, but damn if pop music isn't insufferable right now.

Stop unconditionally compressing the sh*t out of everything, and record the dynamics the way the musicians meant it to be heard. Some music is just meant to be in-your-face loud, and that's fine if it is the artist's intent. But dynamic range is often a big part of the emotional impact of music, and to strip that out in post-production is no less egregious than arbitrarily lopping off part of the frequency spectrum, or editing out one of the original band members.

Normalizing is different than loudness (as used in the context above).

If you really want uniform loudness, look for something called loudness maximizer ( compressors also will do the trick but you get way too many parameter knobs on those). It makes everything equally loud and so louder stuff doesn't have any advantage. In old school receivers, there used to be the magic loudness button that would render music listenable in noisy environments.

I recently listened to MP3s of a coworker, ripped at 320bit/sec but with the volume cranked up. With my 3-way-in-ears, I could hear accustic artifacts I couldn't explain given the nitrate. So I compared to the 30 second sample in iTunes... which was not as loud but had more detail and no artifacts.

Whoever did this *wanted* it that way, probably had lousy speakers and didn't know his MP3-player has a volume setting... *shudder* I like my music with lots of dynamic range

Some of my college buddies were nightclub DJs and they had audio processors that would do this. They would also wire all the speakers in mono. The sound was horrible, but at 170dB with enough alcohol, it's impossible to tell the difference. No wonder I have tinnitus now.

This isn't really "loudness", it's "compression".And it's been done for years on commercial radio and, more recently, on TV adverts.Every album you listen to has been mastered or mixed with compression of some sort on the master tracks.

A good example of how things have changed: listen to Violently Happy by Bjork for an example of when Compression is done correctly (i.e. subtle), then listen to any autotuned crap made within the last 2 years (Ke$ha) for an example of when not to do it.

Of course, the problem is that your average consumer has been trained to like garbage.

Have you ever gotten into a rental car and taken a look at the audio settings? Invariably bass and treble are turned way up. And what's the first thing people in stores do when trying out a sound system? They turn the volume way up. If it's loud it's good, even if the speakers are clipping.

And how much dynamic range does your average pop song have anyway? Not much, it's just a wall of noise. And then if you're listening to stuff like hip hop then you're also dealing with low quality samples.

Wasn't there are article here on Slashdot several months ago about some survey about audio? Researchers found that the majority actually preferred the inferior sound of compressed audio?

So there's no incentive to improve audio quality. The problem is when this sort of crap spills over to good music.

I hate the compression ramifications as much as anyone. However, it does make the sound more like a square wave, which is how the C64 SID chip sounds (I'm also a bit of a chip fan). You get particular harmonic overtones which help give richness to a sound. So maybe people are really responding to *that*.

Obviously the producers are going about it all wrong though, since they get the 'square wave' style, but also lose detail with most of the instruments.

So, they've been releasing crippled recordings for the last twenty years... but rejoice everyone, they are now planning on re-re-re-releasing the same music except without the awful mastering. And they wonder why everybody pirates their crap.

I'm a production director of a radio station so I'm constantly working on commercials. Although I don't go so far as to brickwall things, I do use a variety of compressions, limiters, and EQ to balance out the sound of a commercial -- usually to even out a vocal performance or to make it work with music and sound effects better. There's a cookie cutter and hamfisted way to do it and then there is actually using your ears to do it correctly. That said, what was done with the 5.1 remasters of the Genesis cata

I've only heard The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway and Foxtrot remasters, and it was, as you say, fucking awful. That is an album that has louder bits and quieter bits, and it's truly amazing to see how modern engineering and production techniques, despite the impressive new technology, can make a record sound worse than the original mix. Probably the most disappointing was Supper's Ready, which was turned into a muddy mess, whereas I have a first generation CD from the 1980s, which was nothing all that great

I haven't read the proposed standard (mostly because, not being a sound engineer, I suspect I wouldn't understand a thing), but wouldn't the problem be solved by limiting not the maximum, but the average instead? us Classical fans get our cannon shots just as Tchaikovsky intended, while mainstream Rock music stops sounding like someone fucking your ear with an ice pick, it's win/win. And as a bonus, anyone wanting to have their music louder would have to have more quiet parts to compensate, meaning they'd be encouraged to utilize the full dynamic range instead of pushing everything to the maximum.

Effectively the maximum level is set by the format and is generally define as 0 dB. A format also has a dynamic range, which measures how much quieter a sound the format can capture compared to the maximum. For audio CDs this is -96 dB. The loudness wars refer to taking advantage of the fact the volume the human ear perceives is proportional to the mean level and that music would be recorded with the same maximum level but lower levels mapped higher (e.g. a -40 dB sound is compressed to -20 dB) will sound louder.

This proposal, presumably, addresses this by measuring the volume of a track by measuring the something similar to the mean level. It a little more complicated than that, but I think that's the thumbnail.

Effectively the maximum level is set by the format and is generally define as 0 dB. A format also has a dynamic range, which measures how much quieter a sound the format can capture compared to the maximum. For audio CDs this is -96 dB. The loudness wars refer to taking advantage of the fact the volume the human ear perceives is proportional to the mean level and that music would be recorded with the same maximum level but lower levels mapped higher (e.g. a -40 dB sound is compressed to -20 dB) will sound louder.

This proposal, presumably, addresses this by measuring the volume of a track by measuring the something similar to the mean level. It a little more complicated than that, but I think that's the thumbnail.

Ah, yet another Slashdot "Engineer"...

First, your entire discussion of "dB" is meaningless without an additional "unit". dB, by and of itself, is a baseless unit. It's dBSPL, or dBm, or even the cheat-of-all-cheats, dBu. But NEVER just dB.

But I think you are attempting to equate dBm to "VU". But even those have a real-world signal-level equivalent. 0dBm (IIRC) is equivalent to 0.770VAC across a 600 ohm load.

So, perhaps you are talking about ATTENUATION. THAT would STILL need another unit from the dB (

No intention to be offensive, but when I slam the CD in I don't give a shit about dBSPL or whatever. All I want to do is enjoy the music as INTENDED by its creators.
Take Electric Wizard, for example (hint: album, 2000). Their INTENTION was to distort the music and crank up the volume everywhere. And I love their music. But on the other hand, Metallica's latest whatever-the-album-name-is is CRAP. I listened to half a song at my "I'm a rocka', dude!" acquaintance and left in horror. That ugly composition set

I never claimed to be an engineer. I'm, at best, a layman with a little bit of knowledge. AFAIK, dB is perfectly valid when talking about dynamic range, even in audio engineering literature. For example, Eargle, Handbook of Recording Engineering (2003): "Music in a concert hall is normally perceived over a range that doesn't exceed about 80 dB, and speech is normally perceived over and even narrower range of about 40 dB." And, even more importantly, I don't think it affects what I wrote qualitatively al

you miss the compression (active) that they do in order to 'fit' the envelope 'up higher'.

changing the 'higher' point helps but there are other things going on, too.

its a shame, too. cd has about 90db of dyn range (and modern amps and preamps and easily do that, too) and yet they use a fraction of that. you have a spectrum of 'bit space' to use and you use very little. how sad! how wasteful.

shifting volume (replay gain) is doable. undoing compression is not and that is the real issue.

ReplayGain fixes average differences in volume between different tracks. It doesn't help when a single track was compressed/normalized so that is has no dynamic range. There's really no post-processing that can fix that.

"In Absentia" was their commercial breakthrough, you could do worse than that. Porcupine Tree are a leading "new prog" band, meaning that their rock music incorporates progressive ideas but is based on a modern sound rather than retro callbacks. Pure Reason Revolution are another great band in this area. Try Muse for something more digestible (Origin of Symmetry for guitar riffs, Absolution for epicness, Black Holes And Revelations for more experimental yet commercial anthemic stuff with synths.)

It's pretty hard to be a new band that sounds like 60s/70s rock without sounding like generic rubbish. There are a few bands that have sort of done it, like Wolfmother and arguably The Darkness. Clutch have pulled out a pretty solid string of blues/rock albums.

It's pretty hard to be a new band that sounds like 60s/70s rock without sounding like generic rubbish. There are a few bands that have sort of done it, like Wolfmother and arguably The Darkness. Clutch have pulled out a pretty solid string of blues/rock albums.

Thank you for the info!!

Yeah..I really liked wolfmother...but they stopped at one album...

:(

I saw them at Voodoo fest...and they tore the house down...really reminded me of the great rock concerts in my youth......I wish they would do more...will

As a result, this may be a case where too much dynamic range is lost on the listening audience, as the listener just wants to be able to hear everything without having to fiddle with the volume every few seconds.

Dolby Digital on DVD has the option to compress the dynamic range if you are in a noisy environment (or watching the movie at night). I don't see why this could not also be applied to music. Just have a setting on the player to turn on the compression (or even better - adjust how much compression to use).

Such listeners should just change the dynamics themselves, then: The correct point at which to apply dynamic range compression to compensate for a noisy listening environment is within the playback chain for that particular environment.

It's not so hard. My first portable MP3 player had the ability to apply dynamic compression. My not-so-special Pioneer stereos have this ability as well. So does my Droid. So does even the lowly factory CD player in a 1993 Ford van. And my PC. (I'd go on, but why?)

One can always add more compression/limiting ("loudness"), but once applied it's impossible to take away.

Meanwhile, listening environments haven't changed substantially since the first confluence of the walkman, the portable radio ("boombox"), the home hi-fi, and the car stereo: People still listen variously on headphones, or with barely-adequate portable speakers, or in their home on a properly set-up system, or on ruddy computer speakers (not dissimilar from the discount "rack systems" of yesteryear), or in noisy car, with the same variety of background noise that has always existed when listening to recorded music.

All that has really changed in the past 30 years that it's currently very easy to carry a vast amount of high-quality music in a very portable and readily-retrievable fashion, which was previously impossible. I submit that this improved portability has nothing to do with the dynamic content of that music.

I thought that the overall issue is that the dynamic range of the highs & lows is being compressed. So even with a volume limit on the max loudness, would the engineers engineer the song any differently?

A second issue is that the listening environment is changing - music is being played on portable devices in noisy environments - this isn't a fine listening room. As a result, this may be a case where too much dynamic range is lost on the listening audience, as the listener just wants to be able to hear everything without having to fiddle with the volume every few seconds.

Then I propose that portable music players, and car stereos, grow a dynamic range compression algorithm. With digital media, the "compressor" has the ability to "look-ahead", thus being able to avoid the "pumping" effects of compressors that have to work in "real-time". This allows for not only much higher compression ratios; but also much, much "faster" attack and release times, So, with something like that (which really takes much less computing power than say, an EQ), the world could have its dynamic ran

...the listener just wants to be able to hear everything without having to fiddle with the volume every few seconds.

Portable music players have more than enough processing power to do that kind of volume leveling automatically. The artists/engineers/producers can make a product that will sound its best in a good listening environment, and leave the rest to playback.

A second issue is that the listening environment is changing - music is being played on portable devices in noisy environments - this isn't a fine listening room. As a result, this may be a case where too much dynamic range is lost on the listening audience, as the listener just wants to be able to hear everything without having to fiddle with the volume every few seconds.

Well, that's why I prefer to buy things in say, lossless formats...good for the good living room stereo, and I can also rip them to lossy formats for portable players in poor environments (gym,car, etc)....maybe they could give 2x versions..one for portable and one for proper home audio system?

Or, does NO one anymore care for quality home sound reproduction? Geez, when I was a kid...we all wanted to eventually have a good sound system...I've been building mine since I was a pre-teen saving money from neighborhood jobs...etc.

Well, that's why I prefer to buy things in say, lossless formats...good for the good living room stereo, and I can also rip them to lossy formats for portable players in poor environments

The format doesn't matter when you're discussing loudness, compression, and "brickwall limiting" as is discussed. The audio engineers (and sometimes the musicians) are distorting the signal somewhere along the path to the final master. Thus, what you have in your lossless audio is lossless garbage, and what you have in your lossey audio is lossey garbage.

For example, poke around the Internet for Muse's "Knights of Cydonia". The tracks used in Guitar Hero are cleaner than the mix used for the CD, so someone went through and actually remixed the song from the GH tracks and got a pleasant-sounding result. As a counterpoint, listen to pretty much anything from Foo Fighters' "Wasting Light". They have mp3-quality audio available on their website, and it is not difficult to hear the impact of a good recording/mastering process.

I wish Muse would release a properly-mastered version of Black Holes and Revelations. I think I would even pay for a SACD version of it, just knowing that the intended audience has a higher listening standard. It's sad that the CD just doesn't play well outside of a car stereo, and it paradoxically makes the CD rock less because it's unbearable to crank the volume.

Well, #1 I think it is a delusion that you get more "bits" out of the music if you use all of them. I've never heard music get clearer or richer using that philosophy.

#2, this isn't about peak volume. It's about compressing so that the peaks are leveled out, and all sounds are nearly the same volume. If you overdo compression you start hearing this pumping thing where it sounds like the entire mix is flying into your face and then away again with every bass drum hit. It's very unpleasant if you care abo

Well, #1 I think it is a delusion that you get more "bits" out of the music if you use all of them. I've never heard music get clearer or richer using that philosophy.

Umm, what? Play any CD track after truncating it to 8 bits of resolution and tell me that using only 8 bits doesn't make it way less clearer. If you are playing a live concert where you should set your reproduction to give 90dB sound pressure peaks as if you were in the audience, and there's quiet stuff going on where the original sound pressure was around 40dB (quiet conversation), you're listening to it reproduced as if through an 8 bit D/A converter.

It is not all that much smaller. 24 bits is what you need to listen to a 40dB conversation in 16 bits of resolution, duh. So, if you have a dynamic piece, you will appreciate the difference. Symphonic music recorded in 24 bits and played likewise, in a quiet room, sounds beautiful. The CD sounds worse, and I am no audiophile. It's easy to hear once you listen to the 24 bit system -- though the room has to be at least as quiet as a concert hall would be when they pause.

Dither helps with converter differential nonlinearlity, and helps make discretization noise become less obvious, but does not help in improving resolution. Filtering does the latter. The CD is sampled at 44kHz. Using ideal brickwall reproduction filter set at, say 20kHz, you gain log2(sqrt(22/20)) = 0.07 bits of resolution. That's it. Dithering on top of it will make you lose resolution.